De fleurs

Duparc’s Phydilé might also have influenced De Fleurs, the third of the four songs Debussy wrote to his own words in Proses lyriques between 1892 and 1893. Again, the mood of De Fleurs, in its oppressive hot-house atmosphere, is entirely different from that of Phydilé, but the setting of the first four lines - with their measured progression of chords in an even crotchets followed by a quickening of the rhythm towards a significant modulation - is strikingly similar to the opening stages of the Duparc song. The fragmentation of the instrumental refrain in the closing bars is interesting too.

When Debussy was staying with the Chaussons at Luzancy on the Marne in December 1893 he played his recently completed De Fleurs to them and Mme Chausson liked it so much that he dedicated it to her. Four months later Chausson had written a song on a very similar theme, Serre d’ennui, the earliest of the five items in his Maeterlinck cycle, Serres chaudes, Op.24. Serres chaudes was dedicated in its turn to Thérèse Roger, who was briefly engaged to Debussy and who gave the first performance of the Proses lyriques with the composer at the piano in Paris in 1894.